Shine Your Light on Me

by Lee Thompson

  The janitor’s room would be warm, he imagined. The room had baked in the summer sun when he’d been up there with Connor and Elroy. Men who painted the monolith, and men who took care of the electrical, and men who checked the girders, used the room infrequently. He doubted there would be any sign of life there at all on a night such as this.

  He wanted more than anything to feel Emmy’s head pressed against his shoulder, her laughter soft in his ear, her body shaking with joy against him; to feel Elroy’s hand on his shoulder, and to turn and see the oaf grinning, so kind-hearted, so good; to listen to his cousin Connor talk about the dreams he had of an amazing life, and how he would bring them all along with him because he wasn’t a dick like some people. And he wanted to hear his mother’s voice again, reassuring and gentle despite her gruff nature, doing her best to encourage and understand him, although she barely understood his father. And maybe that’s what love was...

  And what of his father? How could men who deserved nothing from Aiden, hurt a man in a wheelchair who had paid a hundredfold his crime with another man’s wife?

  It was not a world he wanted to live in, and although he’d never had a suicidal thought, he imagined that whatever lie beyond the life they all knew, it would be better and less demanding than this one.

  He missed his dad’s easy laughter, the light he’d had in his eyes before his punishment, the easy-going, loose-limbed storyteller. He’d never been out to hurt anyone, and he’d been a better father than most.

  Maybe death would be a blessing for him. His dad hadn’t been happy, or the same, since Pine did what he did to him.

  The ladder stood at the center of the tower and was surrounded by girders and an encasement. He set Jessica down near the bottom rung and looked up into the darkness. The bottom of the water tower looked like a UFO, pitch black against the sky, hovering there. It was such a long climb, an ascent he doubted the child could make, and he wasn’t certain he’d be able to carry her.

  The wind threw spits of ice against the right side of his face. He pulled Jessica closer to him and shielded her head. He had to try to carry her up. He thought there was only a couple ways he could manage it, and decided that her facing him, chest to chest, her arms slung over his neck, her legs wrapped around his waist, would be the easiest and safest way, yet once he had her positioned and began to climb, it quickly tired him.

  They’d made it twenty feet off the ground and had another hundred and fifty feet to go, or thereabouts, the first time he felt like giving up. But he pushed on. It felt as if Jessica’s arms were frozen around his neck and he climbed up, and up, and up, with her face buried into the hollow of his collarbone and shoulder. Such a slow climb, and so many frequent stops.

  It hurt his neck to look up to see how much further he had to climb, and it hurt his heart to look down and see the ground begin to spin as if it were unstable.

  The wind grew worse the higher he climbed, and colder. His breath hung around his face in clouds, and his sweat chilled his skin. Jessica whimpered. He looped his arm through the ladder and used his other to stroke her head. Just a little more now, he thought. He could see the open grate above. Maybe thirty feet above them. He rested a minute longer and realized that this high up he could see the whole of the area. There were cars driving numerous roads, people blazing their flashlights as they hunted pasture and forest looking for the boy they expected to change the world.

  Aiden repositioned and began climbing again, impressed by Jessica’s strength. She had not tired nor slipped, which had been his second to greatest fear; his greatest being that he would and he’d be the death of them both.

  And then, two minutes later, their heads poked through the hole and his arms shook as he pried her loose and set her on the platform, and pulled himself up onto it as well. It ran ten feet wide around the bottom of the bubble. The utility room on this side offered a panoramic view of the roads and forest and the flashlights and, muffled by distance, another gun shot.

  There was another utility room on the other side of the tower that faced his school.

  He had been popular and comfortable there before Mitch and Pine had hurt his father. Every day since then had changed the dynamic of how other kids, and even the teachers, and the principal, Mr. Russell, treated him.

  Some eyes were filled with pity, others judgment, but he never saw a trace of indifference, which is what he would have preferred. And now, holding Jessica’s tiny, cold hand, he pulled her to the door and tried the knob. It turned easily. The room was neither warm nor cold, when contrasted against the heat in his body or the chill in the air.

  He led the child inside and turned on the light and shut the door behind them. He unrolled the pillow and blanket and laid them out on the floor for her to lie upon. She did so and looked at him and looked at the world he had closed them off from and she seemed on the verge of crying, her face twitching, her brow furrowed, her shoulders slumped and hands in her lap.

  He sat beside her and looked at the light above and behind them and then back at her, and then he raised his hand and cast a shadow on the wall. She looked at it, then at him. He pointed at the shadow with his other hand and moved his thumb and forefinger and mouthed as if it and he were carrying on a conversation. When he turned to Jessica again, she wiped her eyes and raised her hand and cast her own shadow and mouthed words no one could hear, and her shadow puppet did the same.

  Aiden scooted closer to her, his shoes sopping wet, his limbs tight with winter damp, and raised his other hand and mimed his shadow puppet talking to hers. She smiled a little, and leaned against him, and for a while that was enough for both of them.

  • • •

  Jack LeDoux heard the gunfire and he knew his wife had shot Mitch down in cold blood before the chance to do so escaped her. He hung his head while the men behind him, piling through the front door in a surge of insanity, trampled the woman who had fallen only a moment ago, the pastor behind them with his bullhorn, the speaker raised to his lips, calling out loud enough that he didn’t even need the device, “Come to us, boy! This is your destiny, son! Your followers are here. God is with you and He is with us!”

  Jack preferred the man when he’d lost his faith and had spent his congregation’s money trying to test the Lord with his rebellion. He had always been a weak man. They’d grown up together and Jack could remember Dale Clement as a boy, sneaky and conniving, doing whatever he could to line his pockets and make you love him while he did it. He’d always thought he was so slick; smarter than everyone else, better suited to a world where the fittest survived and dined on the less ambitious. He had never been above taking from those who had less than he, and for that Jack had always wanted to put a good scare into him, yet he’d figured to each their own. If people wanted to be his victim, or buy the hope he’d been selling the last ten years, let ‘em. It was no skin off his back. He’d always had enough of his own suffering and guilt to deal with.

  But seeing Clement in his house, commanding that Aiden come join him, that was about all he could stand. He had begun to turn his wheelchair around, to go right up to the weasel and rip him to his knees by his tie and choke the life from him, when he heard cries in the kitchen and was half-turned back as Janice came stumbling into the dining room carrying the shotgun with two men hot on her heels, their eyes filled with bloodlust.

  Why the hell they’d want to hurt her, he had no idea, but it didn’t matter, there was too much chaos in his home, uninvited trouble he could no longer stand.

  He jerked the shotgun from her hands as she went barreling past him, and she was almost to Pastor Clement when she realized she didn’t have it, and the two men behind her—both part of the Tucker clan, blonde, slim, dirty, unkempt moonshiners—grabbed her hair and jerked her back off her feet. She let out a scream that made those searching the living room and the closest for Aiden pause in their endeavor, but Jack didn’t pause, he grabbed a hold of the barrel and turned the weapon around and swung it like a bat, catching one of the
Tucker men behind the knee. He crumpled hard and Jack swung the stock down and opened his skull.

  The man’s brother hadn’t noticed because he was beating the life out of Janice, her blood shiny on her face and flying from his fist every time he raised his arm.

  The pastor walked around him toward the kitchen, calling Aiden his son, telling him to come out, that they needed him.

  Jack smacked the other Tucker low in the back of his skull hard enough that the impact numbed his arms for a moment. The man fell limp across Janice’s torso, his neck broke. Jack rolled closer to his wife, repositioning the shotgun, listening, distantly to the men rummaging through the rooms, throwing things aside as if they were going through garbage. A life time of his memories, of his hard work and his fears, photographs that had shown him as the man he’d once been, confident and smiling and warm, and photos of his wife, who although he knew was not the best looking woman, had been a wonderful wife and a stern mother.

  And the pastor was at the kitchen door by then, reciting scripture as if it were written for just this moment in time, and Jack leaned over his wife and saw that she was wheezing bad—one of her ribs broken and having punctured her lung—and one of her eyes was missing, just an exploded grape in the socket, and blood spattered her cheeks and chin, and her hair was torn in places in lay in clumps around her head.

  He thought it would be a mercy to turn the gun on her and loose the shell in the chamber if there was one unfired there, because he wouldn’t be able to move her, get her in the van, drive all the way to the hospital before her lung collapsed.

  He said, “I’m sorry, babe.”

  He tried to reach over and take her hand and hold it as she went, but men ran between them and knocked his wheelchair back and he had to fight to hold the gun and keep from toppling over.

  When he looked back, her one eye was glazed and staring heavenward, empty of all faith and hope and love and the sometimes-meanness. He had never told her what he was sorry for, how he had taken what they’d built together and dashed it to the ground with his moment of intense heat with the brightest flame in the county, maybe the whole state, and he regretted it, more than she or anyone else could ever know since what he’d had with Janice had been constructed of something deeper than mere physical attraction. They’d had commitment and loyalty and a common goal until he’d set that flame to it and Aria had seemed indifferent as it all burned away.

  He was tempted to tell her he was sorry again but knew she was beyond hearing, and all he could be grateful for was that she’d gone out fast and she’d gone out fighting trying to defend her home and her crippled husband and her son.

  Jack turned around and raised the shotgun to his shoulder and saw Pastor Clement there in the door. He leveled the barrel on him, the man half turned away, still rambling prophecies that held little meaning to anyone but him and those like him. And would the rest of the world act this mad? he wondered. Not if he killed every one of them. But that was a lot of deaths, and he might as well eat a slug and welcome his demise if that were so.

  He cocked the hammer, and for a second it seemed Clement reacted, paused in his speech, turned slightly back toward the dining room. Just ten feet away and Jack had used that gun to fell everything from pheasant to whitetail to bear. The man did not deserve a chance to die facing him or to see it coming. Although Jack wished he could see what Clement would see the moment he passed from this world to the next. Jack did not imagine the pastor would be welcomed by winged angels and a chorus of voices into paradise.

  He called out, “Clement!”

  The pastor turned and his eyes grew wide for a second and then he smiled, warmly, almost like he was pitying a dumb child who knew not what it did. He raised his hand palm out and said, “Don’t be foolish, Ja—”

  Jack scowled and pulled the trigger.

  It hit on a spent shell and the click was dry and loud.

  Pastor Clement laughed, and then looked confused because he didn’t understand what Jack saw. To Clement it might have seemed Jack saw an angel or devil standing in the doorway there near the man; the pastor would have imagined an angelic host, there to protect the man of God and help fulfill his calling on this most holy of nights. But what Jack saw was a ghost that looked just like Mitch O’Connell, its face bruised and clothing torn, filling the doorway, about to shove the pastor out of the way so he could find his daughter until he noticed Jack’s wife there dead on the floor.

  • • •

  When the crazy men behind the house broke the window over the kitchen sink, and then the sliding door, Janice LeDoux was on the edge of pulling the trigger and blowing Mitch’s chest apart. Despite this certainty, he hadn’t felt much fear, only a strong sense of loss as he imagined his daughter always mute, the child raised by Aria and Mickey and Elroy and Pine, and Jessica wasn’t their burden, she was his, and he was supposed to protect her.

  Janice swung the shotgun toward the sliding door and the wind was cold and the wind-beaten faces seemed to float above the threshold, disembodied as they leaned in, their noses hot on the scent of a desire for miracles none of them had ever guessed lived inside them.

  She pulled the trigger and the faces exploded in a wash of red cream and the bodies fell back almost gently into the waiting darkness behind them. The roar of the shotgun had deafened him for a moment. Janice hit a lever and the shotgun broke open and she thumbed the spent shell with efficiency, was in the motion of placing a new shell in the chamber when the horde began piling in, maybe inspired by the sudden quiet from inside the house. She managed to reload and fire at the first wave—three men, two injured and writhing on the kitchen tile, and the third man, faster, or just luckier, jerking the gun, trying to rip it from her hands until she kicked him between the legs like a mule.

  He dropped, face flushed, and mouth a perfect circle, issuing a cry of pain and anger that curled the hair on the back of Mitch’s neck.

  Others were spilling in from outside, slipping in the blood of the fallen. Mitch pulled the pistol he’d used to coerce Jack into bringing them here. He heard the pastor in another room, his voice inflamed and alien through a bullhorn. Four men were on their feet in the kitchen, all of them saying, “Where is he?” as two went after Janice and two trapped Mitch close to the refrigerator, their hands outstretched, their eyes so hopeful and heated.

  He swung the pistol and broke the closest man’s nose. The second one clawed at his eyes but Mitch jerked his head back, rocked his skull on a cupboard, felt the fingers tear his shirt, fingernails graze his breastbone hard enough to draw blood.

  He lashed out blindly, smelling the sour funk of the man’s breath—and the room was well-lit, yet it felt as if he was fighting in a tunnel. His fist connected with something hard and the man made a choking sound, and Mitch pulled his other arm from off his face and the room grew bright, too stark. He kicked the man hard in the knee, heard the kneecap snap, saw Janice was no longer in the room, nor her pursuers, but the pastor’s magnified voice was close to the kitchen door. The man with the broken nose sat near a cabinet, trying to stem the blood flow, all the fight gone out of him.

  Mitch cried out, “Jessica! Honey?” His voice did not carry above the din throughout the house. Yet he cried again, impotently, for a second, remembering how Jack had cried for his wife, for his son, for Aria, then mad with laughter, then broken again, in the woods.

  He stepped over the man with the busted knee and fled for the dining room, a dozen horrible scenarios playing out in his head. In one, he’d find her in the living room, laid on the couch with a pillow obscuring her face, her murderers standing by motionless and waiting for some sign from God...

  In another, he would find her body in the cold, cold snow, body prone, on her back, legs and arms spread as if she was making snow angels, but her skin would be a pale blue, and Mitch knew he’d see her mother’s ghost there, kneeling in the white world beside her, fingers stroking the still, peaceful face of their daughter...

  Then Pastor Cl
ement was there in the kitchen doorway, his back to Mitch, and Mitch could hear Jack say something in a plain, matter-of-fact way, and Mitch moved up beside the man of God, shoved him slightly out of the way, thinking that if there was a hell at all, they’d found it, it’d crossed over this night into the realm of the living.

  Jack pointed the shotgun at him as he came up alongside Clement. But Mitch’s eyes went from the black muzzle to Janice LeDoux dead on the floor. He thought, as he looked back at Jack: You poor sonofabitch...

  Jack turned the shotgun on Clement and frowned and pulled the trigger, only for it to fall on an empty chamber. The pastor chuckled, and he said something, turning slightly toward Mitch, his eyes suddenly spooked. And Mitch blamed this man, knew if his daughter was dead, it was his own fault for coming here, and it was Clement’s fault for riling the whole town and leading them here. They would destroy Jack’s son, too, if they hadn’t already.

  Mitch placed the pistol under Clement’s chin and pulled the trigger. Unlike the empty shotgun Jack held, the pistol was loaded, and as the gun bucked in his hand and a spray of blood and brain and bone splattered the door casing, the strange look on Clement’s face muted. He dropped straight to the floor, appearing for an instant to become boneless.

  Mitch’s ears rang, and his voice sounded muffled as he called out, “Jessica? Aiden?”

  He was determined to shoot anyone who stepped in his path. Jack watched him, unmoving and silent. When he spoke there was a helplessness in his voice: “Somebody must have already grabbed them.”

  Mitch’s heart pounded. He pulled his dead cell phone and then shoved it back into his pocket. “You have a land line?”

  Jack nodded. “You calling Pine?”

  “He’ll find them and he’ll keep them safe until we can get there.”

  “Not tonight, he won’t. Listen to them out there.”

  It seemed those who had entered and searched the house had fled since they’d found what they’d come for. Mitch didn’t want to listen to their hoots and howls. He said, “Where’s the phone?”